‘Parks and Recreation’ Made a Pretty Awesome DeflateGate Joke Last Night

NBC’s Parks and Recreation is chugging through its seventh and final season as fans mourn the end of one of NBC’s all-time great comedies. But some Patriots fans probably did a double-take last night with this visual gag nodding to New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick and DeflateGate.

(For those who can’t read it, the headline says “Belichick on ‘RobotGate’: ‘None of our players are robots.'”)

To add some context, the final season of Parks and Rec takes place in 2017, but the show creators have packed the season full of ridiculous jokes, like the Cubs winning the World Series and the entire town running on extremely invasive tech gizmos from Gryzzl, a shot at Google. Belichick dealing with another, more absurdly futuristic version of the DeflateGate scandal fits perfectly with the version of Pawnee showrunner Michael Schur has created.

The show finished shooting on December 12, so someone had to have gone back and added the RobotGate joke in post-production. But sometimes scandals are too ridiculous for comedy writers to pass up, and DeflateGate definitely qualifies.